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CRO (conversion rate optimization) offers tremendous gains in engagement, often at a fraction of the cost of other marketing tools. Join our free webinar and learn from the experts exactly how to leverage the power of CRO — and the best tools they’re using to do it.

Driving visitors to your sites takes a lot of effort, but it’s only the first step. Persuading them to engage is the holy grail. What convinces a visitor to become a customer?

For Ed Fu, CMO at job platform company ZipRecruiter, it goes far beyond fiddling with colors and buttons. “We view it as an experimental platform to test different theses. It’s a scientific way to discover evidence that supports a theory.”

Eighteen months ago, ZipRecruiter raised $63 million in a first round of funding. And Fu takes a similar approach to CRO. “It’s an investment paradigm,” Fu says, citing Warren Buffet’s discussion of compounding interest in the investing world. “We view it the same way.”

He describes every A/B test win as interest — explaining that companies that use CRO effectively and consistently, perfecting and optimizing the user experience, have a high compounding interest rate.

“And,” he says, “that’s how you engineer growth.”

But more importantly, conversion rate optimization is the evidence-backed way to create a great user experience that not only keeps them coming back, but also persuades and convinces.

“Conversion funnel optimization is a conversation, a give and take between you and your customers,” Fu emphasizes. “At the end of the day, you can test different forms, you can test a number of pages, but what you’re really doing is asking for information from your customers.”

At each step of the process, you need to provide value to them. “The right amount of value,” Fu explains. “Not too much, not too little. It’s a dynamic give-and-take process that is almost like a sales conversation.”

The focus, he says, is on the customer. “We look at how to have that conversation so that we’re constantly adding value for the customer, or for the prospect,” he says, “to increase the probability that they’re giving us more and more information and at the end — hopefully converting and actually subscribing with us.”

He warns that A/B testing can be entirely too surface level. Most out-of-the box A/B testing platforms allow you to easily test headlines, and copy, and button sizes and color.

“But,” he warns, “you have to dig deeper. You have to dig very deep and really try and understand what your customers want and what problem you’re trying to solve for your customers.”

Fu focuses ZipRecruiter’s optimiation heavily on the customized onboarding and product introduction experience, all designed in response to what they’ve learned about the customer’s motivations and pain points.

“If you think about it from the customer problems-first standpoint, and the customer segmentation first standpoint,” Fu notes, “you can unlock massive wins in CRO.”

Fu will be joining VB’s Stewart Rogers who will dive into the best CRO tools based on VB’s latest in-depth CRO report — which ones are killing and which ones not so much — as well as Alex Lirtsman, Chief Strategist of ReadySetRocket.